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Turn Websites Into Geocities Pages

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:00:06 +0000

Geocities was a popular service back then that allowed its users to create basic websites. Many Geocities pages dated back to the beginning days of the Internet where webmasters liked to use animated gifs, sounds and other distracting elements on their pages.

The Geocities-izer brings back those fond memories by offering to turn any modern website into a Geocities look-a-like that is making use of all those elements that were popular back then.

It works by entering the url of a website into the form on the main page of the service.

Three different themes and twelve different music themes are available that can be switched by changing the parameters directly in the url. The themes are also switched randomly whenever a new page is loaded.

Users who want to go down memory lane can visit the Geocities-izer tool to turn their websites into something completely different. But beware, it might hurt your eyes and ears. (via Instant Fundas)

Elf Yourself Redesigned

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:43:56 +0000

Last year, around the same time, we spotted a very interesting service that made it possible to dress five people as elfs and have them perform a dance afterwards. The Elf Yourself craze was born and it quickly became a popular website. On a sidenote, my nephew who was 4 at the time, loved to see his family dance the elf dance.

This year the Elf Yourself website has been redesigned. There is a bit more of advertisement on the website but also additional content to make up for it. Don’t worry! There is still the classic elves dance for those who might have missed it last year or cannot get enough of it.

In addition though you can now see them dance Disco, Country or Charleston as well each with a unique stage and effects. The music is obviously also different on every stage.

The developers have added possibilities to download the videos to the desktop or post them on various social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Expect a huge increase in Elf Yourself appearances on those sites.

Meet Emily

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:02:49 +0000

I’m loosely following the technological advances in a few sectors that are not directly related to the topics I write about at Ghacks. This includes advancement in new input technologies like Microsoft’s Surface but also character animation and robotics.

Maybe once or twice in a year I come upon something that is so fascinating that I have to applaud. Meet Emily is one of those situations. Some of you who follow this tech sector more closely might have seen the video already, for those who have not read on.

I do not want to spoil the fun and would like to ask you to view the video below and hear what the interview is all about, a description of the technology. Once that is done scroll down to read the rest of the article.

It’s impressive is not it? The interview did look a bit unreal but not enough to convince me that Emily was in fact not a real person but a computer model. Here is another video making use of the facial motion technology of Image Metrics.

That’s fascinating in my opinion. Many game publishers have been among the first to become clients of Image Metrics but you also find television and movie makers as well as advertisement companies amongst them.

List of problems solved by MacGyver

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:15:15 +0000

Today was such an evil day full of trying to solve a riddle with only a few clues that I had to find something interesting funny to post at the end of it. I loved to watch MacGyver when I was a kid, it was always cool to see how he was able to build something from nothing to get out of dangerous situations.

Much like the A-Team did in the good old days when they build some huge car to break out of their prison. It seems that someone wasted a lot of time to add a list of problems solved by MacGyver to Wikipedia. Every episode of the five seasons is mentioned in the list and it’s interesting and sometimes funny to read.

Stuff like “MacGyver builds a distraction by balancing pots and pans on a bag of ice that melts from heat produced by a toaster oven. He spreads vegetable oil in the ground to incapacitate some kidnappers” or “MacGyver starts out in Berlin, trying to escape with a microfilm containing government secrets. He takes the place of a dead person and is carried in a coffin towards a bridge, where he is dumped into the water by friends. Upon hitting the water, Mac hits a button and turns his coffin into a jet ski, riding away to safety” are precious, don’t you think..

IP Spotting

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:10:10 +0000

Please be warned that there is no serious use for IP Spotting (via Donation Coder). It does provide a level of entertainment though for a while and is definitely a nice idea. IP Spotting is a website that analyzes the IP addresses of its visitors and scores it using an out of this world chart that includes the IP as a poker hand, a bitmap of the IP and if the IP matches a barcode in real life.

As I said it’s pure entertainment. The website seems to be highly popular because it already analyzed more than 380K IPs over the course of several years. My current IP scored a whopping 10 which is bad if you consider that the leading IP received 86 points but not so bad again if you consider that there are negative scores as well with the lowest being -4 currently.

The only two tests that my IP scored was the poker hand where it qualified for a pair (+5) and that it got only even numbers (+5). Users can take a ride with the random IP script and enter an IP manually to see how other IPs are doing on that website or take a look at the leading or last IPs. As I said pure fun for a little while, nothing more.

Convert Boring Units to Real Objects

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:47:27 +0000

1000 Kilogram are 1.3 cows, 5.6 female lions or 1 shire horse while 100000 kilogram equal 18 male African elephants and 7.1 Big Bens. The website Sensible Units (via Genbeta) converts boring units like Kilogram, Meters, Miles or Pounds into real world objects. There is obviously no real scientific value behind the calculations but it is still interesting to discover how some units convert into real objects.

Currently only units of length and mass are converted into real objects but the developers promise to add additional units in future versions. The conversions are displayed immediately on the website which means everything takes place on the same page. The script lets you know if it cannot find any real world object of that size; Don’t give up at that point, you might be surprised that it will most likely find objects for larger values again.

Pure entertainment, what do you think ?

OT: Bridge to Terabithia remake for geeks

Tobey — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:04:11 +0000

Are you a fan of “Bridge to Terabithia” movie? Are you fond of IT stuff? Both? Then check this out. None? Then check it out too, you might come to like it anyway.

I loved that movie when I saw it and I still do. It even made me ignore my lack of talent and draw (yes, on a real paper, using my very own clumsy hands!) a picture, which is fairly untypical of me and hardly ever found in my regular schedule. Having had my own computer out of order for some time now, I had lots of time to spend on a homework we got in school – writing an English essay that would resemble a classic fairy-tale.

I meant it to be inspired by the movie from the very beginning but still wanted to make it somehow original. Then I got a few ideas on how to adapt the basic story to the IT environment and internet culture and thought that those ideas weren’t that bad after all. After one whole afternoon spent on writing (again, on a real paper instead of word processor canvas), I came up with something that may not be exactly called “art” but I still liked it myself and wanted to share it with the web community. Though, I do recommend watching the movie first, if possible.. no, I’m not adding a torrent link here.

Link: Gate to the Net – Bridge to Terabithia for Geeks via Scribd.com

Description:

The excellent and beautiful movie “Bridge to Terabithia” inspired me to write this remake as a school essay. Specially designed for people with a slight insight into the technology world and internet stuff.

System requirements:
Fantasy Unlimited 2.0
Friendship Understanding 2008
Emotion Extension Pack Free
+ Technical Inaccuracy Ignorance Engine

If you happen to like it, I’d appreciate another digg.

Face in a Hole

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:03:49 +0000

It seems to be the tip day of the week because this is actually the third tip I received by email today. Carlos send me the tip, thanks for that. Face in a Hole is a website where you can put your face, or the face of someone else, on well known images. Ever wanted to have the Rock’s muscles, Audrey Hepburn’s body or Wolverine’s claws ?

Face in a hole makes that possible. Just select a scenario from one of the many available. You can filter scenarios by categories if you like. Available categories are for instance Sports or Advertising. Once a user has selected a scenario he has to choose a source for the face that he wants to put on the image. The choices are either a webcam image or one from the hard drive.

The image is then added as a layer to the scenario and you can move it around, zoom and rotate it so that the face fits perfectly with the image that you have uploaded. The system tries to put the image that you upload in the correct relation to the scenario that you have selected.

Once you are satisfied you can simply save the image and send it to your friends or upload it to your Facebook or Myspace profile. Lots of fun guaranteed !

Mikontalo Lights Project

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 14:59:46 +0000

The Mikontalo Lights Project was created by the students of Tampere University of Technology in Finland. “The object of MIKONTALOLIGHTS was to create the world’s physically largest colored graphics platform by using the windows of Mikontalo’s D-staircase as light pixels. The platform was used to play Tetris and other games and present demos created by the students of Tampere University of Technology.”

The technique used in this project sounds intriguing. Each window acts as an individual pixel substituted by LED lights that are controlled by computers. A total of 99 pixels are available to display static and moving content in different colors.

The games and demos are controlled using a mobile phone and either a Bluetooth or WLAN connection. Below are some amazing videos that show students playing Tetris and a Space Invader clone. Some demo movies – they actually held a demo competition – are shown at the end as well.

The Silent Japanese Game Show

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:13:36 +0000

Silence can sometimes be really funny. The following videos are taken from a Japanese game show where the candidates have to be silent most of the time. The “do not laugh” or “gaki no tsukai” show is funny but might be unsuited for some of the viewers, it can be quite disturbing at times if you are used to European or American tv shows. The first videos show the candidates in various situations where they are not allowed to laugh, the last two shows take part in a library where they play a silly game. It is a little bit like jackass..

Game for the Weekeend Rumble Box

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:25:23 +0000

Rumble Box is a great freeware beat em up game which uses characters made of cubes and balls. Controls are pretty easy to figure out. Use the arrow keys to move your character, double tab forward for a dash, press the spacebar to hit and use Control to grab. The enemies enter the level through doors that appear in the walls that limit the box that you are fighting in. Defeated enemies stay in the level dispelled in the objects that they were composed off.

The ultimate goal of the game is to pile up enough enemies in the level to be able to exit the box that you are in. Every now and then you enter certain bonus stages to earn extra points. The game looks and plays great. It is fast paced and lots of fun.

found: freewaregenius

Sudoku Portable

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:12:41 +0000

Sudoku is a addictive puzzle game which became popular in Europe just a few years ago. The goal is to fill the nine 3×3 grids with the numbers of 1 to 9 each and exclusively for the whole row and column. The concept itself is pretty simple but there are various difficulty levels that make it quite a challenge.

You may solve the easy levels by simply eliminating all other possibilities but this is not possible in hard or impossible mode. You start with fewer numbers in the grids and have to think around the corner to make it. Quite a challenge. Portable Sudoku does not require installation and can be stored on an usb stick for instance.

The game is automatically saved when you exit it and it has some modes that make life just a bit easier. Check mode checks the numbers that you have entered thus far. Solve game on the other hand solves the complete game which could be nice if you are stuck and can’t continue on your own. The download is only 400k in size and available for windows.

Art Rage play with paint

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 12:02:48 +0000

If you ever wanted to paint again the way you did when you were in Kindergarten then Art Rage is the right program for you. The free version is limited but sufficient for everyone who just wants to play around. I think it would especially be a very nice application for kids because they surely will enjoy the ease of use and ways of painting that art rage offers to them.

It is possible to create a wide variety of images. The website hosts a so called gallery forum where artists show off their work and some looks very impressive. They also offer a tutorial about creating the cartoon figure in the left picture. I like it, will show it to my nephew who is four years and I bet he will enjoy playing with it.

Curator Defense

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 13:59:39 +0000

It seems that everyday a new tower defense kind of game appears on the internet and gets linked pretty quickly. I found areference to the game Curator Defense in the donation coders blog and can absolutely recommend it. You have to download the 50+ megabytes freeware game but the download is well worth it. Pieces of art invade the museum and you have to stop them to prevent them from replacing the master pieces in your museum.

It sounds pretty silly but it is actually tremendous fun. You have to place certain structures to slow down and destroy the art that is invading the museum. Destroyed art and the end of a wave adds credits to your account and you can purchase more and better stuff to fight the tougher waves that come in later.

I was getting best results by using connected rows of sharp banisters with stop signs, ghost detectors and of course the various cannons. It gets tough pretty fast even on easy, did not pay attention how far I made it but I think it was around 15-20.

Musicovery a Interactive Radio

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:22:55 +0000

If you wonder what a interactive radio would look like you should visit the Musicovery website. The main part of the website shows songs which are connected by lines to each other. Clicking on a song centers and plays the song and all the adjacent songs are displayed as well. The left menu displays either a mood graph with that shows energetic on the top and calm on the bottom, positive on the right and dark on the left. You can click either on the graph to navigate or click on certain songs to reach a certain position in the graph.

Genres are displayed below the graph starting with rap which has a red color in the main window and ending with disco in a light green color. Clicking on a genre loads only songs of that genre. You may also remove certain genres from the overall map, so if you don’t like rap and latino you could remove them.

That is not all – you may define a time period which has the result that only songs of that period are displayed. The graph has a second display which is simply called dance. This graph has tempo + on the top, tempo – at the bottom, dance+ on the right and dance- on the left.

I was not able to find a way to stream the music through a media player, if you know if that is possible contact me. Songs are played in good but not brilliant quality. You could select HiFi but this would mean you would have to pay for the service. ($2 for 30 days at the moment).

I would be willing to pay this amount of money if they would offer a way to stream the music.

Update: I did play around with their website and found out that the songs that you see are connected with lines. The first song that you clicked on is the starting song. Once this one finishes all songs along the line are played one after the other which means that you do not have to click on a new song once the old one finished playing. Great feature. Still miss streaming support.

Fight Man

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:00:38 +0000

We all know and love those stickman animations that started to show up some years ago. There have been some incredibly works of art and I bet that many watchers thought that it would be really cool to play a stick man game instead of just watch the animation. Their prayers have been heard: This weeks game for the weekend is called Fight man and is a game like Double Dragon, only with stickman.

Fight Man is a flash game, you can play it in your browser. You may modify controls before it starts or jump right into the action if you like. Default keys are Z for boxing, X for jumping and C for a roundhouse kick that gets rid of the nearest opponents to catch you breath. Use the cursor keys for moving your char around.

The bad boys are of course in an advantage, you always face four or five of them all the time and some enter the stage with weapons like sticks. It’s fun to play and well made for a flash game, if you have some spare time check it out.

Zombie City Tactics

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:48:16 +0000

Sometimes it’s the small free games that are more fun to play than the large commercial games. Zombie City Tactics is such a game. It’s about 2 megabytes in size and beats many commercial games in the most important criteria of them all: gameplay. I’m not the only one who thinks that graphics are way overrated when judging games. Sure Gears of War is a nice game, but a really good one ? I don’t think so.

But I don’t want to rant about other games, back to Zombie City Tactics. The turn based strategy game is quite simple to understand but hard to master, just like chess for example. You start on a beautiful map (hrhr) with some forces of your own and your task is to beat all the zombies on the map. Your forces consist of milita, soldiers and slayers from weakest to toughest.

Militia may move one space per turn and slay the every zombie that has one hitpoints in the space they enter. Soldiers have the advantage that they do not have to move into the space to defeat a zombie, they can stay in their own space and slay adjacent zombies. Slayers are the fastest type of units the player has at his disposal. They can move 2 squares but end their turn if they slay an enemy.

Zombies on the other hand have the advantage of the generators. Those pour out zombies every round and you should take care of them as quickly as possible. Some zombies are harder to beat having more hitpoints.

You can train new solders by using energy that you collect by occupying squares on the battlefield. Every square adds 2 points of energy and you need 20/30/40 to buy Milita, Soldiers or Slayer units.

This game is nice. I always loved turn based strategy games like Shining Force and Panzer General and this is just a basic version of those games. You have to think a lot in the later levels to beat the computer who is playing fine most of the time.

The game has 100 levels which should keep everyone busy for days.

Playstation 3 in the news

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:12:36 +0000

The PS3 has arrived in North America. The crazy thing is, if you ask me, that you read and hear more about shootings, shortages and systems that are not working than from the number one thing that should leave everything behind: Games that are fun to play. Did anyone actually buy the Playstation 3 for himself or did they all want to make a fortune by selling the system on Ebay ? With fake biddings reaching a million and more dollars Ebay decided to pull the plug and allow only auctions where the seller was able to prove that he did own the system at that time.

This is by far the craziest launch I ever witnessed. How far do people go for a gaming machine ? I decided to collect the most interesting articles in the categories Crimes, Hardware and Games. Please add your links if you want to join the fun.

Crimes:

Man shoot waiting to buy Playstation 3
PS3 Fight shuts down Walmart
PS3 Riot
Texas Gamestop Robbed at Gun-Point

Hardware:

One Man’s HDMI Issues
PS3 dead on arrival
PS3′s disc loaders defective ?
PS3 does not do 1080i ?

Ratings:

Gundam – 2 of 10
NBA 07 – 4.9
Resistance 9.3

Ultrastar – Singstar like game for your PC

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:33:16 +0000

Have you ever played Singstar on the Playstation 2 ? It is a Karaoke like game that is great fun if you play it with some friends. Ultrastar looks clearly like it was inspired by Singstar. The big advantage ? It is completely free and offers many texts for songs on various websites on the internet. You need to download the Ultrastar main program from Sourceforge at the beginning, it is only 500k which means it should be a fast download even for slow connections.

Install Ultrastar and try it out, you will need at least one microphone to use the software. The downloaded version comes along with one demo song which you can try and get a hang for the tool. It is possible to play the game with up to four players which is tremendous fun, if you are kinda shy you might want to try it alone first. Works great and fast. One song is of course weak. It is rather easy to get new songs and I’m going to explain two methods to do so.

You download text files that contain all the information ultrastar needs to add the song to its library of songs. You do need the mp3 files as well which is normally not included when you download the text file. A good tutorial that explains this process in detail is located at ultrastarstuff.com. You basically need to download the text file, take a look at the name the mp3 should have and name the mp3 file accordingly. It would be best to download text files with song information from mp3 files that you already have on your computer.

The second method might be illegal in most countries. Fire up Emule and Search for Ultrastar. You should find many packages that contain the music and the text files, some even include videos of the song which makes it even more fun. A site with links to some of the emule downloads is the Spanish Ultrastar website.

Nintendo Wii Launch Games

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 08:12:46 +0000

The Nintendo Wii will come out in the United States November 19th, 2006, in Japan on December 2nd, 2006 and in Europe on December 8th, 2006. The Nintendo Wii features a unique method of controlling the action on screen which could revolutionize the way games are played on video game systems. It concentrates on this aspect instead of pure horsepower like the ps3 and xbox 360.

Wikipedia lists 26 games that will be available on launch day in Northern America, some are the usual multi-platform titles but many make good use of the new controlling scheme. Still, only a few rely on the scheme exclusively. A big advantage of Nintendo’s Wii is the price – the basic system including the Wii Sports game costs only $249.99, this is less than half the price of a premium playstation 3 system which does not ship with a game.

Games for the Wii seem to have a lower price as well, most stay close to $50 while PS3 titles are closer to mid-end $50. The Wii still features all those popular games, like Mario, Zelda and Metroid that made Nintendo the biggest player in the video game market which is great for Nintendo fans. It also offers the unique opportunity for different kind of games that have not been possible with normal controllers.

Let us start with the games, I included at least one link to reviews or previews to give you the ability to read more about a specific title that could be of interest to you.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (ign preview)
Barnyard (ign preview)
Call of Duty 3 (ign review: 7.7)
Cars (gamespot review)
Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 (ign preview)
Excite Truck (ign preview)
GT Pro Series (ign preview)
Happy Feet (gamespot review)
Madden NFL 07 (ign preview)
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (ign preview)
Metal Slug Anthology (gamespot preview)
Monster 4×4 World Circuit (gamespot review)
Need for Speed: Carbon (ign preview)
Open Season (gamespot preview)
Rapala Tournament Fishing (gamespot preview)
Rayman Raving Rabbids (ign preview)
Red Steel (ign preview)
SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab (ign preview)
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz (ign review: 8.4)
The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (gamespot preview)
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (lawrence: 9.9)
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent (gamespot preview)
Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam (ign preview)
Trauma Center: Second Opinion (ign review: 8.0)
Wii Sports (ign review: 7.5, lawrence: 8.9)
World Series of Poker (gamespot preview)

Everyone has of course his own game types that he likes to play, some like Sport games, some racing, some roleplaying games. It is a matter of taste and the Wii should deliver something for everyone. Let us take a look at the most interesting games of some of the most popular categories:

Wii Party Games: Wii Sports included, Rayman Raving Rabbids, probably Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. Watch out for Wii Play which is a launch title in Europe.
Wii Games you can’t do anything wrong with: Zelda
Unique to the Wii and worth a look: Trauma Center: Second Opinion, Red Steel

Everything else is up to you. If you have not played all those typical games that come out for all systems (Splinter Cell, all EA games, Call of Duty 3 aso you might want to check them out as well.)

I will buy a Wii and use it for games that you can play with friends plus games that use the unique controller for the Wii in a great way. I will not buy conversions, I will not buy all those games that you can buy for every system that comes out. Wii is unique and that is what I want as well, unique games.